Prevent People from Copying Text on Web Pages

If, for some reason, you would like to prevent users from copying and pasting text from your web pages through Ctrl-C Ctrl-V, or using the mouse, jQuery can help.

$('body').bind('copy paste cut drag drop', function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
});

The bind function attaches an event handler to the main body element and prevents the clipboard functions for all the elements on the page. Use can however still copy text though the DOM tree that can be accessed using the Chrome Dev Tools.

Also, if you would like to disable cut-copy-paste operations on certain fields - like the password input field or the text area, the following snippet should help. When the copy or cut event is fired, nothing happens.

$('input[type=text],textarea').bind('copy paste cut drag drop', function (e) {
  e.preventDefault();
});
Amit Agarwal

Amit Agarwal

Google Developer Expert, Google Cloud Champion

Amit Agarwal is a Google Developer Expert in Google Workspace and Google Apps Script. He holds an engineering degree in Computer Science (I.I.T.) and is the first professional blogger in India.

Amit has developed several popular Google add-ons including Mail Merge for Gmail and Document Studio. Read more on Lifehacker and YourStory

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Digital Inspiration has won several awards since it's launch in 2004.

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